Three from S.A. picked for landmark contemporary art exhibit

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August 31, 2014

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, will host “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now.” The exhibit, which showcases the work of 102 artists from across the nation, opens Sept. 13.

Photo By San Antonio Express-News

Vincent Valdez calls "The Strangest Fruit, " a series of paintings of lynched figures, a defining mark in his career.

Photo By Courtesy Mark Menjivar

Paintings from Vincent Valdez's series “The Strangest Fruit” are part of the exhibit “State of the Art.”

San Antonio artist Chris Sauter will be part of a national survey at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Express-News file photo.

Chris Satuer's "The Whole World" will be included in the Crystal Bridges show. Photo courtesy of Mark Walley.

At 29, Michael Menchaca is one of the youngest artists in the "State of the Art" exhibit.

Photo By Courtesy Michael Menchaca

A still from the video "Codex Heterogenous, Codex Vidiot Vidi"by Michael Menchaca, which is part of his contribution to the Crystal Bridges exhibit.

Even before the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art was built, museum President Don Bacigalupi was thinking about the role of contemporary art at the institution in Bentonville, Arkansas.

"Our founder, Alice Walton, and I were talking about the hope and maybe the responsibility that the museum could, in fact, help people to engage more with contemporary art," Bacigalupi said. "In so many places that I've worked, contemporary art is often the last thing people respond to. They love to go see an exhibition of Iimpressionist paintings or Egyptian art or Renaissance or baroque paintings, but they forget to pay attention to contemporary art made by artists who live and work in our own time."

Bacigalupi is hoping "State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now" will help change that. The survey exhibition, which runs Sept. 13 through Jan. 19, features work by 102 artists from around the country, including three from San Antonio — Chris Sauter, Vincent Valdez and Michael Menchaca.

During 2013 and 2014, Bacigalupi and assistant curator Chad Alligood traveled around the country to meet more than 900 artists selected from a preliminary list of about 8,000.They began their travels in Texas, where Bacigalupi started his career, serving first as curator of contemporary art at the San Antonio Museum of Art, then as director of the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston. Here, they met with more than a dozen artists. Ultimately Sauter, Valdez and Menchaca made the short list, securing bragging rights for San Antonio as the Texas city with the most artists in the show.

"It shouldn't be surprising — and I wouldn't say this to everybody — but we all know that San Antonio has always had a rich and thriving and very interesting and engaging art scene," Bacigalupi said.

The resulting exhibition could be seen as a portrait of the country itself.

"We had a conversation right at the beginning before we started traveling with President (Bill) Clinton, who has been a real supporter of this project. He said, 'You have an opportunity to put a new face on America by virtue of the artists that tell our stories,'" Bacigalupi said. "I didn't really think again about that, but when we put together the exhibition and we started looking literally at the faces of these artists and how they indeed represent the story of America in their diversity and their backgrounds and the stories they tell, it really is the American story."

Vincent Valdez

When Bacigalupi and Alligood arrived in San Antonio, Vincent Valdez was working on "The Strangest Fruit," a series of large-scale paintings inspired by the lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Texas at the end of the 19th and early part of 20th centuries.

The works depict the contemporary figures of young Latino men in poses that suggest the violent means of their deaths. Physical bonds erased, their limp bodies hover in the middle of an otherwise blank canvas as if rising into the ether. The title of the series is a reference to "Strange Fruit," the song by Abel Meeropol performed most famously by Billie Holiday.

In the past, the 36-year-old artist — a slight figure with short black hair and a closely cropped beard with hints of silver here and there — has worked on his meticulously detailed paintings one at a time. This time, however, he had multiple canvases going at once in his studio, a space on the near West Side he shares with fiancée Adriana Corral.

"They were really one of the few and one of the first people that got a sort of sneak peek at them," said Valdez, known for tackling socio-political themes dealing with race and masculine identity in his work

The paintings debuted at Brown University's Bell Gallery, then returned to San Antonio for an exhibit at Artpace. Now three of the paintings are headed to Bentonville, Arkansas, for "State of the Art."

"The way in which Vincent articulated what he was about in that body of work and his ability in his whole career to convey his ideas in paint was remarkable," Bacigalupi said. "There was no question but that we would return to him to see those works finished."Valdez considers the series a "defining mark" in his career.

"I really see them as something new, something fresh that's really sharp in terms of vision, refinement of craft and skill," he said. "I feel like it's clearer than anything I've produced."The exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is a chance to place his work in a broader context.

"I think most importantly for me, it's great to see that my work fits into a broader context of art, whether it's contemporary art or up-and-coming national artists working in various mediums," he said. "It will be interesting to see (the paintings) pulled out from the collection of other images and placed into an entirely new scope and perspective."

Chris Sauter

In the past, when Chris Sauter has reached milestones in his career, they haven't always jumped out at him as such — at least not at the time.This time, maybe, it's a little different. Being selected for the exhibit at Crystal Bridges is a pretty big deal, the artist acknowledged with a laugh.

"It's a milestone in that it's a national exhibition that kind of acknowledges my work as important enough to be looked at," said Sauter, boyish at 42 with a neatly trimmed blond mustache and beard and steady blue eyes. "I've had some great opportunities and I've been in some exhibitions that were pretty important, but none of them were this kind of scope."

Bacigalupi and Alligood visited Sauter at his East Side studio. A former church, it is a fitting setting for his recent work, sculpture and installation that deal with religious faith and science.

"(It was) a really inspiring conversation with an artist who is deeply engaged in communicating ideas — particularly seeing Chris in his studio and hearing him talk about his interest in the intersection or the tension between scientific belief and our faith in these different sectors in our lives," Bacigalupi said.

At the end of July, Sauter traveled to Arkansas to install his work at the museum well ahead of the exhibition opening "because the process is kind of messy," Sauter said. "So they didn't want to have to deal with the dust on everybody else's objects."

For the piece titled "The Whole World," he built a telescope and a microscope out of material cut from a freestanding wall. The patterns left on either side of the wall evoke a microscopic slide of organisms and a constellation of stars. The piece is about the origins of humanity and the universe from micro and macro perspectives.

Sauter grew up in the Lutheran church and has a longstanding interest in science.

"I've been interested in religion for a long time, particularly world religions and the history of religion," he said. "I'm interested in history and origins, and religion is a really good place to delve into those ideas."

Nonetheless, he got a few powerful jolts of culture shock from a handful of fellow students at Texas State University in San Marcos who casually dropped racist jokes and comments. One memorably remarked on the "dirty Mexican mustache" on a cartoon-like cat by Menchaca.

The experience was "a huge change in my life," said the artist, a lanky 29-year-old with dark, wavy hair who is currently working on a master's degree at the Rhode Island School of Design. "That's when I decided to focus on my cultural heritage, and my identity became a subject matter for me."

Menchaca creates colorful prints and videos inspired by Mesoamerican codices — pictorial manuscripts from cultures including the Aztec and Maya. The symbols he creates, however, are distinctly contemporary. There's his "Migrato," an immigrant cat dressed in a sarape, and gun-toting rats that represent drug-traffickers.

He wants his work to be read in the same way that he has to read the ancient texts.

"I'm flipping through a few reproductions and I don't have access to the definitions of these glyphs, and for me it's almost satisfying that I don't know those definitions, so I'm making up a narrative for myself," Menchaca said. "I wanted to give that experience to the viewer, so they can just determine for themselves what's going on."

When Bacigalupi and Alligood visited with Menchaca, the artist had an installation at Artpace in the Window Works series. They met on the sidewalk in front of the display. Though the conversation was interrupted by street sounds and punctuated by "clunks" and "boings" from the audio accompanying the installation, Menchaca made an impression.

"His ability through his work to talk about the kind of pre-Columbian traditions that he is mining and bringing them up to date in our own kind of American pop culture and talking about issues that are pertinent and present in our own lives, particularly immigration, was so rich and so inviting and kind of seductive," Bacigalupi said.

The "State of the Art" exhibit in Bentonville, Arkansas, will feature a suite of four prints and two videos by Menchaca, one of the younger artists in the exhibition.

"I'm really thankful to be included in this examination of American art now," he said. "'State of the Art' is a pretty big statement in itself."